Up in the sky, it’s a bird!
It’s a plane! No, it’s the International Space Station!

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Jim Tiffin
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — The first step to leaving Earth for other planets will be visible in the early mornings and evenings Sunday through Wednesday in Gallup and Grants.

Billy O’Keefe, the astronomy instructor at New Mexico State University-Grants, said the International Space Station will be visible to the naked eye as a bright moving object.

Residents of Gallup and Grants will be able to see the space station clearer, and it’s structure as it glides above the two cities, if binoculars are used, he said. Times and days for both Gallup and Grants are below.

The space station will be visible in the sky at different heights from the ground. It will be anywhere from 23 to 83 degrees above the horizon.

To determine the height from the ground, if you put your fist out at arm’s length, that represents 10 degrees.

According to NASA, the space station is in orbit 216 miles above the Earth and traveling at a speed of 17,200 mph and it circles the Earth 15.7 times each day.

Because of recently added solar panels — which are about an acre in size — it is the brightest man-made object in the sky.

Construction of the station, in orbit, began in 1998 and will be completed in two years.

It will eventually mass out at 520 tons, measure slightly more than a football field at 356 feet wide and just less than a football field at 290 feet in length.

O’Keefe said the space station stays in orbit because of the distance from the planet and the speed, which is called centripetal force.

“Mass, or weight, in space, is not the same as on Earth,” he said.

“Eventually we will have to leave this planet, as a species, to survive,” he said. “The space station is the first step to traveling to the moon again and eventually to Mars. Then outward to other planets.”

The human race has time to mature and develop technologies to leave Earth, because the sun — which is middle aged right now — will go Nova and expand consuming Earth in about 300 to 400 million years, he said.

“If we are to survive as life, we need to get off this planet,” he said.